Returning to the SATA Express standard
- the reasoning behind this progression of providing PCIe compatibility instead
of simply moving up to 12Gbps SATA was discussed in a SATA-IO ORG white paper
-
Why
SATA Express? (pdf) - which says among other things...

"Many
of the backplanes and cables that worked fine at 6Gb/s won't reliably carry data
at 12Gb/s. And even with the background work already done on 12Gb/s SAS, it
would not have been possible to have a 12Gb/s SATA spec out in time. Also
PCIe has been shipping
for years and is a mature technology. PCIe 3.0 (8Gb/s or 1GB/s) provides the
needed bump up in speed with a single lane. By comparison, SATA at 6Gb/s equates
to 0.6GB/s. Next generation PCIe 4.0 will double the bandwidth to 16Gb/s (or
2GB/s) per lane, so SATA Express has a growth path."

This new technology will allow for platform cost reductions and
performance improvements while supporting a seamless transition from Parallel
ATA technology. Serial ATA will supply storage interface headroom for many
generations to come, beginning with 1.5 Gbps, scalable to 2x, 4x and beyond.

"Seagate is proud to demonstrate at this early stage that Serial
ATA technology will soon be ready for implementation, and that the industry's
technology leaders are working together to make it happen," said Tom
Porter, Seagate executive VP and CTO. "There are many hardware and software
engineers who attend the Forum to set their blueprint plans for the coming year
and we're happy to provide them the first glimpse into the Serial ATA future."

"Vitesse is pleased to demonstrate Serial ATA Physical Layer
solutions with early adopters of this exciting new technology," said Bob
Rumer, VP of the SAN Products Group at Vitesse Semiconductor. "By combining
expertise from APT Technologies, Intel, Seagate and Vitesse we will be able to
provide the industry's first complete Serial ATA IC solutions."

"The development of this prototype is key to illustrating that
the industry is on track to deliver
Serial ATA. We have
also demonstrated widespread O/S compatibility running the setup under Windows
98, Windows NT, Windows 2000, Red Hat Linux and Solaris 8 with both ATA and
ATAPI devices," said Jim Rubino, president and CEO of APT Technologies. "Our
ability to demonstrate the viability of Serial ATA technology on both ATA and
ATAPI devices is another step toward ensuring a smooth transition from parallel
ATA/100 to Serial ATA"

Seagate, APT, Intel and Vitesse are
among the members of the Serial ATA Working Group (which in September 2004
became SATA-IO)
developing the Serial ATA storage interface specification for the
next-generation computing platform.

This interface is used to connect
storage devices, such as hard discs, DVDs and CD-R/Ws, to the motherboard and is
the replacement for today's Parallel ATA physical storage interface. Serial ATA
is compatible with existing ATA software drivers and will run standard operating
systems without modification.

...Later:-
SATA - as we now
call it - became a very successful interface for hard drives. It was the
critical inflexion point in the server industry's transition away from
parallel interfaces for DAS storage to higher performance serially connected
standards.

In some ways
PCIe SSDs represent a
turning back from that model. But in the pursuit of affordable faster servers -
all rules are made to be broken.

.

.

Megabyte's
Auntie Wanda used both old and new technologyies

..

..

who were the pioneers in enterprise 2.5" NVMe PCIe SSDs?

By 2004 - within a few
years of the earliest SATA drives shipping - it was already clear that SATA -
an interface created to satisfy a roadmap for
consumer PC
storage - also had the potential to replace (legacy parallel)
SCSI in the enterprise
storage market too in applications such as
RAID systems.

SSDs are among the most
expensive (and complex) computer hardware products you will ever buy and
understanding the factors which determine SSD costs is often a confusing
and irritating process... ...which is not made any easier when market prices
for apparently identical capacity SSDs can vary more than 100x to 1!

Why is that? There are
good reasons for these cost differences. But more expensive isn't always better
for you. To find out what goes into the price - and whether you need it - ...read the article